She nodded. “When we were working the Murphy case, a CI mentioned him. Buryak. Something about shipments of product at the Red Hook piers next few weeks. It wasn’t part of the homicide so we just sent it to Narcotics.”
Rhyme said, “Couple hundred kilos.”
Sachs corrected, “Bigger, I remember.”
Douglass shook his head. “Well, Buryak never touches product himself. You’ll never catch him buying or selling anything other than information. But maybe we’ll catch somebody in the net who’ll dime him out.” He gave a wry smile. “I’ve spent six months of my life trying to roll up Buryak and I’ve got nothing. Then this tip comes out of left field and maybe that’s how he’s going to get collared. Hell of a line of work we’re in, don’t you think? Hell of a line.”
56
Four people were in on the conversation.
Lincoln Rhyme was supposedly off the case, yes, but since those on the call were only Sachs, Averell Whittaker and his niece, he’d decided to take the chance of an appearance, though he let Sachs handle the lead.
She explained about their discovery that Kitt was the Locksmith.
The gasp was from Averell Whittaker. “No.”
Joanna Whittaker said, “That’s not possible.”
Sachs explained about the evidence she’d found in his apartment — the shoes, the victims’ underwear, picking tools, the Daily Heralds.
“It can’t be...” His voice faded.
Then Joanna was whispering, “Jesus. I just realized something.”
Her uncle was saying, “What is it, Jo?”
“The newspapers. Page three, February seventeenth. Aunt Mary died March second, two thousand seventeen.”
Rhyme said, “It’s a code. Damn it. Missed it completely. Page three represents the third month, March. The February issue? February’s the second month, so we get the number two. And the date, the seventeenth, is the year. Three/two/seventeen.”
Sachs said, “We were focusing on the content. It had nothing to do with the Apollos or Russian hacks or anything else on the page.”
“Oh my God...” Averell Whittaker cleared his throat. “I didn’t mention this, but the reason Kitt walked out of my life, our lives. It’s my fault—”
“Uncle—”
“No, it is! I was busy buying that damn TV station and wasn’t at Mary’s bedside when she passed.”
Silence between uncle and niece. Finally Joanna said, “She wasn’t alone. Kitt was there. And — how could you know? The doctors themselves couldn’t say for sure how long she had.”
“I... I feel that it’s my fault. The way I treated him. The neglect...” Did the man choke a sob? Rhyme could only imagine the shock of a father learning his son was a felon and potentially a murderer.
“Averell...” Joanna coddled. “Don’t think that way. Nobody forced him to go off the grid, to do the things he’s done.”
Rhyme glanced Sachs’s way, and the look meant that they needed to move things along.
She said, “We’re pretty sure he’s living out of a workshop in the city. Do you have an idea where he might have some place like that?”
Silence again. Joanna spoke. “No, like we said, we’ve been wholly out of touch... seems like forever. Uncle Averell?”
The man was struggling to speak. “No, nothing.”
“Is your fiancé there?” Sachs asked Joanna.
“No, he’s at work, but I’ll call him. I’ll do it now.” There was a pause as she made another call on a different phone and broke the news to Kemp. A moment of silence. “I know, I know... but they’re sure. They found evidence and... you know how he’s been...” Her voice faded as if she didn’t want to be too hard on her cousin in front of his father. She asked about a workshop or someplace else he might be staying. Another pause. “Did he say where? Anything more?... All right, honey. I’ll see you later.” She came back on the line with Sachs and Rhyme. “Martin works in real estate. Late last year Kitt asked him about subletting an artist’s loft or workshop. What neighborhoods would be the most out of the way? He said he didn’t want distractions.”
“Why did he want it?” Rhyme whispered, and Sachs repeated the question.
A moment later, Joanna said, “Kitt didn’t say.”
“What did Martin tell him?” Sachs asked.
“He recommended Long Island City, Spanish Harlem, the South Bronx. But he never heard back from Kitt about what he decided on.”
Sachs said, “Please keep this to yourself for the time being. We don’t want to tip our hand. We want to find him and bring him into custody safely.”
“Thank you for that,” Joanna said.
“Ah, Kitt,” Whittaker whispered. They ended the call.
“So,” Rhyme said, offering an exasperated sigh, “our perp, he’s hiding out somewhere in an area that’s about sixty square miles. What could the problem possibly be?”
The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer is a remarkable merger of two devices essential to forensic scientists.
Lincoln Rhyme had always insisted on having one in the lab, though the units are quite pricey. They’re used to find out what an unknown sample of evidence might be. Chromatography, which was invented in Russia in the early 1900s, has been described as a horse race. An unknown sample is vaporized into a gas, which then begins a journey through a column filled with a liquid or a gel. Different substances within the sample move at different speeds through the column. The result is a graph of the materials. Each one is then analyzed in the companion device, the mass spectrometer, which identifies them.
In the sterile portion of the lab Mel Cooper and Amelia Sachs were using the GC/MS to unlock the secrets of the evidence she’d collected from Kitt Whittaker’s apartment and the site of the Sandleman Building fire that had nearly been Ron Pulaski’s funeral pyre.
As they waited for the results, Cooper confirmed that the running shoe in Kitt’s closet was the one he’d worn in the first two apartment invasions and the Bechtel Building, replaced now by smooth-soled shoes, which held less trace — as Rhyme had speculated he’d done.
Outside, Lyle Spencer and Rhyme watched. The criminalist hoped some unique geographic trace would adhere to something Sachs had bagged and tagged and this would lead them to the man’s workshop. Even if they could narrow down only a five- or six-block area, the canvassers, armed with pictures of Kitt Whittaker, could then go to work.
Spencer had pulled a shoulder muscle in the climb — that remarkable ascent — and had stripped to a T-shirt as he applied an ice pack Thom had fixed up for him. He was perhaps the most muscular man Rhyme had ever seen. On one biceps was a tattoo of an anchor; on the other were the initials T.S. in Old English type.
Spencer coughed yet again. The smoke was still embedded in his lungs.
“From The Towering Inferno,” Cooper called.
Another popular cultural reference, Rhyme deduced. He was referring to the evidence that Spencer had lifted from the floor, just before his descent to the ground.
“We’ve got ammonia, urea nitrogen, phosphate, soluble potash.”
“Ah,” Rhyme said, “fertilizer. I didn’t know what to make of the boron, copper and iron from the Bechtel Building. Now, combined with these, it’s fertilizer.” He asked Spencer, “Your arm okay to write the notations on the board?”
“Sure.” He did so, then stepped back and reviewed the entries. “Bricks in a wall.”
Rhyme’s very expression. It meant small bits of evidentiary discoveries, while not dispositive in themselves, could be combined into a formidable case for the prosecution. The more bricks the better, even if one duplicated another. Redundancy was good. Rhyme knew all too well that defense attorneys always managed to cast doubts on some of the evidence.